The Pfizer park. A modern citadel, old new rising from the marshes. Gouged out from inlets and outlets, from sea and mud and gravel and ooze and sand and catching bushes and branches. I think a lot of it was built on pontoons, to raise it above the bi-quotidian incoming tide. The tide couldn’t be stopped indefinitely but there’s a feeling that the company thought their science could Canute it, laying down car parks and tarmac, their laboratories and offices, on shifting strata, as though they’d not find the space, 20 years later, sinking back into the mud like so many before them.
The quayside. So many centuries of worked use and now just another stop-off for rich boat owners. An industry lost, one used to bringing trade goods down river to the many official buildings here, to the Barbican gate & the Guildhall and then load again their small barges and sailing boats, to take them up river, to Canterbury I think. In my head, I see all the people who’d considered the river their own highway, one they traversed, day in, day out, only occasionally setting foot on land, maybe to have a drink in a pub, to see a friend or a mistress, to maybe gamble on some horses at the side.
The bay at Pegwell. Reeds and bullrushes and mud, seeping silently over the boots as you walk through the marsh. Rivulets of water running where they wish, between tussocks of tough sea grasses, tricky, apt to spill you over, to land you in the water or sink you into the mud. The feeling that the view stretches on for ever to France somehow missing the sea in between, that you could, with care, navigate these tussocks, these bits of high ground, the raised sand banks to walk all the way to the continent, like the hovercraft ghosts you still hear on the abandoned concrete apron.
